Guiyang villages reaping benefits of efforts

Local officials have helped to develop natural environment, e-commerce and tourism industries

Villages in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province, are undergoing dramatic improvements in economic development, environment and people's livelihood as the local government continues to boost e-commerce and "internet plus agriculture" to revitalize the rural areas.

"In recent years, Guiyang has grown the industrial revolution in rural areas and supported the development of local industries in scale, branding, industrialization and collaboration," said Chen Yan, mayor of Guiyang.

The city will build a new group of demonstration zones for rural revitalization, which integrate natural environment, industrial development, rural governance and innovation, he added.

In 2020, the total value of the agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery in the city surpassed 30 billion yuan ($4.63 billion).

The influx of e-commerce platforms into the rural market has transformed the way of local shopping, brought improvements to local people's lifestyles, and become an important way of promoting targeted poverty alleviation, local officials said.

Libei village, which once relied on traditional agriculture, is now renowned as Guizhou's first Taobao Town, with booming online sales of its local specialties such as rice tofu, zheergen, Chinese bacon and other agricultural products across the nation.

The village has created a two-way information service platform to analyze statistics, distribution locations, and sales of shopping malls, supermarkets, and convenience sites throughout the county.

"In addition to selling products on e-commerce platforms, we also learned to sell goods through livestreaming," said Lu Kunlun, an entrepreneur at Libei village.

Once a migrant worker, Lu returned to his hometown to start a business in 2018.

He began selling goods through livestreaming and set a record of 1 million yuan in sales during a single session.

Qingzhen in Guiyang is another landmark for e-commerce development in rural areas. It was awarded as a national-level comprehensive demonstration zone for rural e-commerce development in 2015.

On Jan 20, the Qingzhen New Year Festival opened on online big data platform One Code Guizhou, which covers exhibitions, consumer vouchers and consumption scenarios.

Qingzhen selects famous and high-quality local products, establishes the themed area of Qingzhen New Year on the platform and uses a WeChat public account, short videos, webcasting and other channels to publicize its eight bowls, specialties and scenic spots such as Qingzhen Huangba, Four Seasons Guizhou Hot Spring and Hongfeng Lake.

On Jan 29, the city opened its first e-commerce service center to facilitate the development of the live broadcast e-commerce industry.

The center built a live broadcast room to promote the integration of new media and enterprises while expanding the pool of internet celebrities.

In 2017, Qingzhen launched a cloud platform on quality traceability research and construction of agricultural products from Guizhou Changjin Luojiaqiao Base, Youqi Vegetable Base and Shanyun Tea Base. Each production base has equipment to monitor and analyze atmospheric humidity, soil, air pressure and other data, while synchronously transmitting it to the system terminal.

Together with the base agricultural information filled in by the producer, it forms a basic product that can be viewed by scanning the code on the mobile phone.

With the support of the agricultural cloud platform, the agricultural sector's supervision of products is faster and easier.

In the past, Yadianhe village in Qingzhen was dirty, chaotic and poor.

The village's change in appearance has benefited from the government's rural revitalization plan, which requires not only economic prosperity and social development, but also a beautiful environment.

"Thanks to the government's subsidies, the dry toilets have been converted into clean and sanitary flushable toilets. A new courtyard wall and flower beds were built in my house, and the environment in the village is much better," said Li Haimei, a resident in Yadianhe village.

Li used to be a migrant worker but has since started a farmhouse in her hometown.

Guiyang has cleaned its villages through seven key projects, including domestic sewage treatment and the upgrading of rural toilets.

In 2020, the city built 141 demonstration villages for the improvement of human settlements. It also renovated 24,604 household toilets in rural areas and 214 village-level public toilets.

Through in-depth improvement of rural homes, the production and living conditions of Yadianhe have been greatly improved.

The village has attracted Guizhou Zhilian Agricultural Technology to set up a boutique fruit, vegetable and citrus base and also encouraged villagers to participate in the industry.

"The altitude here is low and the climate is warm," said Cao Zhengyuan, head of the base.

"It is very suitable for growing oranges. The environment is also beautiful, which is very suitable for the development of tourism."

Covering 20 hectares, the base is operated on a business model consisting of company, cooperative, village collective and farmers.

"The model has transferred the land of more than 100 villagers. The annual rent per mu, or 0.06667 hectares, is 600 yuan, and 15 percent of the income will be distributed to the villagers," Cao said.

"The villagers earn at least 80 yuan a day and the base has planted the 'Red Beauty' orange variety imported from Japan. In the future, it will be transformed into a modern agricultural sightseeing park," he added.

Each year, many tourists drive to visit, relax and pick mulberries at Yadianhe.

"We will continue to improve rural human settlements, build high-quality orchard bases and expand and optimize the mulberry industry," said Fan Houjin, Party secretary of the village.

"We will also rely on the unique natural scenery and tourism foundation to actively develop rural tourism and realize the integrated development of agriculture, culture and tourism."

Fan said the village is working on a rural tourism plan centered on Dongfeng Lake and including Zhijin Cave and Wujiang Gallery Scenic Area. Officials aim to build the entire village into a combination of water tourism, boutique orchard sightseeing, and farming.